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Comment by mrisoli | Hacker News Reader

> I wish we spent as much time on HCI in our field.

So did I, but IME, time and effort spent on minor UX improvements are rarely justifiable to upper management, especially in the case of business software it won't generate more revenue, often because the people using the software are not the ones buying it.

I've had the fortune of working in a couple of places where the most hardcore users of our product were our own employees. So I often silently wandered into others desks and observed their workflows, it's amazing to see the little hacks they come up with because of their routine. Sometimes it's things we can easily fix but it's not prioritized. Quite often I've spent a couple hours of my free time hacking together some minor features to help these internal users and they are always amazingly grateful.

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This is huge in publishing. So many workflows are outdated or require so much copypasting and customized scripts, etc, that it’s pretty ridiculous.

I’m part of a team searching for an appropriate tool and the pickings are slim. Thankfully the people buying the software that may be in use for the next five years to a decade are taking it very seriously and working closely with a number of experts around the company and editorial teams. They’re also very familiar with the regular workflows, so they don’t fall prey to salesmanship.

My schedule’s kept fairly open lately to give me “free time” to develop something to help with a specific aspect of it (as upper leadership isn’t openly keen on any in house development). It’s been very interesting working closely with the people who will be using it just 3 floors away on a daily basis.

I’ve done similar projects in the past and some people were ...more grateful than others...

But the current situation is a little different, and the art and editorial teams this time through have been fantastic. I think it’s because they know exactly what they want to make their days and weeks easier, and they’re so grateful to even get close. And I’m happy to try and deliver as much relief as possible.

If you want to justify minor UX improvements, you should give a copy of Steve Jobs' biography to your upper management ;-)

Howso?

Because Apple rose to its success partly because of its UX philosophy.

But I don't think GP is going to achieve their goal with this. On the contrary, I bet their managers already read that book, and that's why the UX sucks in the first place. The managers want to follow Steve Jobs' footsteps, and treat UX as a sales driver, instead of something that should be designed to make the end user productive and happy.

Part of the reason that Apple found more success after 1998 was the “consumerization of technology” the end user was the buyer and not the corporate IT department. The UX is a sales driver for the buyer. In the corporate world, the buyer and the user are not the same person.

Apple never had much corporate presence, outside publishing and graphics.

That's what I just said....

But the iPhone has a major presence in corporate America, has first class support for Exchange servers and their are plenty of MDM solutions deployed for iDevices.

Ok, I didn't get that initially.

Actually, this suggests that there was a relatively brief period, probably about 1986 - 1996, where corporate IT buys dominated personal computing.

Earlier, and it was hobbyist markets (and corps used mainframes and minis). Later and it was mass, then mobile, markets.

Not that corp purchasing doesn't remain large, and influential. But it's no longer hegemonic.

But yes, corporate buys present a principle-agent problem, especially as regards UI/UX.

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